As ex CIA analyst Ray McGovern pointed out yesterday the only big fish to be hooked in the decade of intrusive monitoring of our private communications turns out to be the head of the CIA. Irony abounds, drips, and oozes.

In addition, General John Allen, a 35 year veteran of the Marines is under investigation in part to determine what’s behind the 20-30,000 emails and other “inappropriate communications” between himself and a woman variously described as a voluntary social liason and socialite from MacDill AFB in Tampa.

That’s twenty or thirty thousand separate communications in two years. Take the low number and divide by a couple of years worth of days and we have a General officer communicating with a socialite party planner nearly thirty times a day. That’s a lot of partying.

Bear in mind that the taxpayers are shelling out over $15,000 dollars a month to to keep this four star naval academy grad at his desk running a major US military command that is currently involved in at least one war and a clutch of other hot conflicts around the world.

His former boss, now retired General and former head of the CIA David Petraeus, is at the apex of whatever comic opera is involved here, along with his biographer, a former military intelligence officer and, it seems now historically noteworthy camp follower named Paula Broadwell.

Petraeus, the darling of the neocons who gave us the war in Iraq, and Broadwell have admitted to having a ten month affair while he was the nation’s top spy. As an enlisted Marine I always thought that generals led boring lives. Who knew?

Like everyone else looking at this national insecurity drama I have no idea what’s going on but I’m pretty sure it goes far beyond Private Beetle Baily planning a weekend kegger at the beach.

Both of these general officers have had long and supposedly stellar careers as senior staff and both are past commanders of CENTCOM. A few more days of the kind of revelations now popping up hourly and they both may be transferred to SITCOM.

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